1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to touchscreens. More specifically, the present invention relates to a touchscreen with a light modulator.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally speaking, the tablet input paradigm attempts to mimic the direct interaction of a human finger with a piece of paper: touching and dragging the screen causes the underlying image to move as if it were a piece of paper being touched and dragged. This, combined with gesture-based cues to zoom, advance, etc. creates a vocabulary for a user interface paradigm.
However, this vocabulary is at odds with the classic keyboard-and-mouse interface paradigm. The most obvious issue is that on a tablet device, there is no keyboard. While it is trivial to add a real keyboard to a tablet device, doing so destroys the illusion of using the device like a book. Thus, most tablet devices opt to emulate a virtual keyboard when textual input is necessary. Doing so, however, requires the screen real-estate to be split with the keyboard, greatly reducing the viewable area of content.
A less obvious issue, but perhaps more severe, is that on a tablet device, there is no cursor; the user's finger alone is a pointing device. While this behavior is more intuitive in the context of the book illusion, it is incompatible with user interface notions that take advantage of contextual mouse-cursor location, such as hover-menus and context-tips. This problem is particularly pronounced when using web content: for example, the popular on-line TV website Hulu uses a hover-context UI to present a menu of channel selections. While Apple is on a campaign to eliminate this UI paradigm from the Internet, as well as Flash as a standard rich media format, it's questionable if they will be successful in such an endeavor.